Voice Memos disappeared after iCloud Sync in all my devices (iOS 17 and MacOS Sonoma)
I'll explain what happened in order: I have two devices, a Macbook Pro and an iPhone Xs, both with Voice Memo Sync on.
- I updated my iPhone to iOS 17. This made all the Voice Memos in my Mac to change their title to the recording date (Because of the new encryption feature they enforced in iOS 17).
- Then I updated my computer to MacOs Sonoma (previously on Mojave), this didn't change the titles back to their original name, they kept the dates as titles, so I guessed I had to deal with it.
- A day later I opened the Voice Memo app on my iPhone and it started downloading the Memos that were synced to iCloud from my computer (There were so many because as the titles of all files were changed to the recording dates in my computer, it attempted to download all of them again on my phone (even though they were already there, with their original title names)).
- As I was watching this happen on my phone, suddenly all of these "date" files disappeared. I then open the Voice Memo app on my computer and see that they also disappeared there. They are nowhere, not even in the "recently deleted" section.
- Now I only have 3 voice memos I recorded yesterday and all of the rest are just from 2021 and before (for some reason pre-2021 memos didn't get deleted). But all my memos from these last 2 years disappeared. There is so much precious information and moments, I just can't believe they are gone like this, without warning, on all my devices, because of an iCloud bug...
Is there any way to recover them? This is clearly a bug by the team behind either iCloud sync, or the Voice Memo app. Their new encryption feature in iOS 17 completely messed things up! It's ok to add more privacy stuff but not at the cost of such bad implementation!